Creating and sharing content is essential to marketing your business online. One way to do that is by writing a blog. Blogging allows you to share your expertise with a wider audience than you otherwise would be able to.

Here are eight tips for blogging successfully:

1. Choose Relevant Topics
Readers come to your blog to learn more about your product or service. Write in a way that answers any questions they have about your business or its offerings. Consider common questions that customers might ask about your products or services and write answers to those.

Also, look within your business for potential topic ideas. Ask other members of your team who work with customers what questions or situations they encounter in their work. A simple brainstorming session can give you more topics than you need.

2. Consider Your Audience
To best relate to your audience, write how they would speak. Most people won’t understand your industry’s jargon. This is especially true if you’re in a specialized field like law or finance. Before you can write as your audience speaks, you need to know who they are.

Creating a buyer persona can give you an idea of how to best approach writing for them. Let’s say that you’re a financial advisor and your ideal customer is a young adult starting to plan for retirement. You’ll need to break down complex topics into plain language they can understand.

3. Include Keywords
For people to consume your blog content, they must be able to find it. Keeping a blog can help your search engine optimization, or SEO, by providing search engines with more content to crawl and rank. To start, you need a list of keywords relevant to the topic of your blog post.

When writing your blog, be sure to include these keywords in your post in a natural and relevant way. If you simply try to put in keywords wherever you see fit, search engines may not rank your post as highly as they consider it to be keyword stuffing.

4. Give it a Title
The title is the first thing a reader sees when accessing your blog post. Make sure that it draws them in and lets them know what the blog post is about. Remember, you have less than seven seconds to make a good first impression online.

Also, you need to keep search engines in mind when creating a title. Your title should be less than 60 characters long to appear in search results in full. It also should include your main keyword to benefit your search engine ranking.

5. Formatting Matters
Along with having relevant content, your blog post should be visually appealing. The minimum length of a blog post is 400 words. However, longer posts are acceptable if you have enough content. Although, they need to be formatted appropriately.

If you create longer posts, use headers like H2 tags to break up long stretches of text and divide sections into subtopics in the blog. These also benefit your SEO by letting search engines know what topics are covered in the blog post.

Also, use whitespace. Instead of typing large blocks of text, divide the text into smaller sections with whitespace in between. These sections can include bulleted lists or full paragraphs. Dividing your text in this way can make the blog post easier to read.

6. Include Visuals
People tend to be drawn to visuals like images or videos. Because of this, visual elements can enhance your written content on your blog. Along with a main photo at the top, consider adding photos throughout your post.

If relevant, video can also be included in blog content. Let’s say that you’re a fitness trainer writing a blog on various stretches to do before exercising. Along with writing descriptions of the stretches, include a video of you stretching in the blog for readers to follow along with.

7. Provide a Call to Action
Your blog post can be the beginning of a conversation with a potential customer. Like other content on your website, you should include a call to action in your blog post. This way, your reader knows the next steps to engage with your business.

If you offer a free consultation, as we do, include a link to your contact page and a line in the text asking readers to contact you to schedule this consultation in your post. This should be included naturally in the post without looking like you’re trying to sell to your reader.

Example
Designing a new website can be overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. If you want to create a new website, contact Links Web Design for a free consultation today.

8. Write Regularly
Your readers want to hear from you regularly. That is why you should commit to planning your blogs to go out on a set schedule. This schedule varies depending on the needs of your business. We blog around once a week, but you may find once a month works better for you.

To plan these posts and when they will be published, create a content calendar. This can also help you keep track of what topics you cover and who creates the posts. You don’t need to purchase a special app to do this. Creating a spreadsheet is sufficient.

Ready to Start Blogging?
Blogging may seem overwhelming if you’re just starting out, but it doesn’t have to be.

Contact Links Web Design for a free consultation today.

Links Web Design is a Content Marketing Agency in Bangor, ME, and Fruitland Park, FL.